Toolchain Framework (TCF)

The Toolchain Framework (TCF) is Dev-Centr’s planned framework for producing Toolchain Control Plane implementations.

It is not the pattern. The pattern is Toolchain Management Pattern. TCF helps maintainers generate, wire, and validate systems that comply with that pattern’s protocol and ship a control plane.

Why “Toolchain Framework” (not TMF)

Lead with Toolchain Framework (TCF). Maintainers think “I’m responsible for a toolchain”—not “I’m building a management app.” Toolchain Management Framework (TMF) can bounce the right audience. Keep Toolchain Management as the umbrella in prose; keep TCF as the kit name.

TCF is for software ecosystems broadly (languages, engines, cloud CLIs, ML stacks, internal paved roads)—not only programming languages.

Inversion of control

In the classic software sense, a framework often owns control flow and calls your code (Hollywood principle). TCF may work that way:

  • A host runs a fixed lifecycle (bootstrap → pin → health → repair → upgrade).

  • Ecosystem maintainers supply adapters that map their existing toolkit pieces into that interface.

That is inversion of control: existing tools become plugins under a unified management host.

Ecosystems can still comply with the pattern by growing their own entrypoint and never adopting TCF. Then control flow stays inside their CLI; TCF is optional scaffolding, not a requirement for compliance.

Relationship

Layer Role

Toolchain Management Pattern

How you think — canonical explanation

Toolchain Management Protocol

How you act — behaviors in the pattern page and DevCentr ecosystem-management spec

TCP / TCoP

What you ship — control plane product metaphor

TCF

How you practice — schemas, adapters, generators, conformance tests

Intended contents (direction)

  • Canonical contracts (pin, health report, repair plan/apply, upgrade/rollback) as schemas.

  • Ecosystem adapter stubs (Flutter, Node, Rust, Android SDK, .NET, cloud CLIs, …).

  • Generators for CLI verbs and optional GUI shells that share the same contract.

  • Conformance tests: “does this entrypoint behave like a Toolchain Control Plane?”

  • Guidance for mapping OS package managers (winget, Homebrew, apt) into bootstrap flows.

Default repo: https://github.com/dev-centr/toolchain-framework.git

CI builds TypeScript validators and validates schemas + example adapters on every push/PR to main.

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